[vox-tech] Installing a desktop upon my laptop

[Bill Kendrick]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 10:10:30AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
<snip>
> I'm guessing that, some time during your installation ordeal ;-> , you 
> enabled KDE sound support, which is apparently via something called the
> "arts" daemon.  Thus, your currently-configured sound support is
> KDE-dependent, which is probably not really what you had in mind.

Many modern apps these days support 'arts' as a sound target.

Recently, XMMS was having difficulty working with arts.  However, it works
fine with esd (the Enlightenment sound daemon), so if you wanted arts, but
you wanted to use xmms, you could actually run:

  artsdsp esd

Which would trick esd into thinking artsd was your dsp, so any sounds that
went to esd went through arts, first.  It increased latency, but did the
trick.  (And for playing music in XMMS, some latency is fine.  For video games,
it'd get a little annoying, though.)

KDE has a panel applet to turn arts on and off, I believe, too, in case
you have apps that can't run on esd or via artsdsp, or you simply have
latency issues with doing such trickery.

Now, if you don't want arts, but you do want the silly sound effects
that KDE's window manager and apps can make (like Kopete making noise when
some instant-messenger-using friend comes online), I believe you can
specify some sound-playing application get run to play the sounds.
For WAVs, I just used "playwave" (I think part of the SDL demos...?)

I'm sure "mplayer" would be just as good, with the advtantage of being
able to play MP3 and OGG format sound effects, too.

See KDE's control panel, under the "Sound" stuff.  (And remember, you can
actually search for control panels by keyword; see the pane on the left!)


> I can guess how this happened -- and, please, don't think I'm being
> critical of you at all, in saying this:  I crashed and burned on Debian
> desktop setup a few times before learning a couple of hard lessons.

I'm still learning my hard lessons. :)


<snip>
> Most of that will be of no lasting importance, and will have been mostly the
> background muttering of installation tools,

Hehe...  "Super Foobar 1.3 used to do X.  Now it does Y first. [OK]" ;)


-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com                            New Breed Software
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/       Tux Paint 0.9.14 -- Coming soon!